Companies across the country are coming around to a radical idea with the potential to upend the industry powering the global economy: They don’t have to blow their budgets on AI. Fed up with ballooning costs, companies big and small are starting to use lower-priced models, including some built in China. In many cases, they are adding the new, cheaper models alongside OpenAI and Anthropic’s products, shopping a la carte for their artificial intelligence. At Cursor, a startup that stands to benefit from this corporate epiphany because its software works with all models, Mike Saeks puts it simply: The most powerful and expensive AI models aren’t necessary for relatively mundane tasks. “It’s like driving a Lamborghini to go to the grocery store to pick up milk when that was designed to be raced around a track,” he said in an interview.

Full report : US companies have flipped from “tokenmaxxing” to “thrift-maxxing”, mixing cheaper Chinese models with OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s, threatening the labs’ valuations.